South Park - Preview Roundup

A bunch of sites have released new previews for South Park: Stick of Truth. Here are just a few of them I mangaed to find today.

PC Gamer

It really is an impressive facsimile of the show. The layered papery caricatures are perfectly reconstructed, wobbly walking animations and all. The game shares the show's voice talent, the writing is sweary and sharp. I didn't see any evidence of branching quest-lines or narrative forks, and combat was trivial, but it's fine fan service.

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CVG

From what we've played, it's clear that South Park: The Stick Of Truth could very likely be the game fans of the series have been waiting for. Who knows whether the rest of the game retains the same standards, but if you only the play the same hour as we did, you're gonna have yourself a time.

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IGN

Regardless of how solid its under-the-hood RPG mechanics are, it’s unlikely to win over those who don’t find the show funny, but it certainly stands a good chance to at least lure in RPG fans who are new or neutral to Parker and Stone’s no-one-is-safe social satire. If its first couple hours are any indication, then we may one day soon look back on The Stick of Truth as the best and most authentic licensed game ever made.

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Gamespot

Ultimately, The Stick Of Truth is going to live and die by its humour; what I briefly saw of its RPG mechanics didn't seem exciting enough on their own--and even then, there's got to be context to all its ribbing on Jews, Chinese people, religion and, well, just about anything you could possibly be offended by really.

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Gamereactor

Series' fans will spot plenty of cameos and locations, but there's also a cracking, and deep, combat system in place, with timed counter-attacks, special abilities and rock hard battles making for gameplay that is, to badly paraphrase the show, pretty sweet.From our new hands-on, the game's gone from a tie-in novelty to a must play. Even if we feel guilty for laughing.

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More information.

These previews confirm some of my fears from watching the last gameplay video of the tutorial. While it seemed they got the atmosphere right (it even made me smile some when they bashed TB combat), the combat did indeed look trivial, to use PC Gamer's word. If the combat blows, that left me with the hope of decent C&C, co sidering Obsidian made it.

If there is no significant C&C, I'm afraid a linear romp through South Park with sucky combat likely won't be enough for me. Think I'll take a wait-and-see approach to this one.

I get the impression there's going to be two story arcs, one for siding with Cartman and one for siding with Stan/Kyle. Of course, I could be completely wrong. Also, there's no telling how different the stories will be (assuming there are 2).